"For a poet like myself, an autobiography is redundant," W.H. Auden wrote to a friend, "since anything of importance that happens to one is immediately incorporated, however obscurely, into a poem." This scholarly book, originally published in 1999, is a history of Auden's poems, and of the events that went into them, from the time he moved to America in 1939 until his death in Austria in 1973. Edward Mendelson links the changes in Auden's intellectual, religious, and domestic life with his shifting public roles as a moralist, lecturer, and teacher. Throughout, he reveals the depth of Auden's struggles with himself and with the temptations of his growing fame, showing how these struggles gave shape to his imperishable art.